Anna's Archive told to pay Spotify and record labels $322 million over unprecedented music scraping

The open-source library and search engine Anna’s Archive has been ordered to pay Spotify and the three of the world’s largest music labels $322 million in damages after it claimed to have scraped the entirety of the streaming platform’s library of music. Spotify, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, sued Anna’s Archive in January for a slightly comical $13 trillion. They alleged Anna's Archive had illegally scraped 86 million songs — a significant chunk of all the music on the planet — and intended to make them available for download via BitTorrent. At the time, Spotify called the scraping a "brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings." In a since-deleted blog post, Anna's Archive stated the scraping was an act of preservation. Still, a New York federal judge sided with the plaintiffs after the archive's anonymous operator failed to respond to the lawsuit. The